The first time that you attempt anything is you being a square peg in a round hole, giving yourself the permission to do something differently. Sure, you may not “fit in” sometimes and you most certainly won’t be welcomed by harmony at first for it’s only when you enter the eye of the storm that you find the calming center.

It’s a Friday night and while most people your age are out partying and making memories [some of which they would like to forget the following morning], you’re busy curling up with a good book from your ever increasing “to-read” list. While others are busy spritzing their favorite perfumes and donning their highest heels, you’re inhaling the dried ink of a freshly turned page, adrift in an alternate world in the shoes of the protagonist.

While the starting line of any race is inundated with people, there’s almost never a crowd in the last mile. Success is akin to crossing the finish line, and if you’re anything like Sakshi Malik was during the Olympics, you win by a few seconds and lots of determination. Aggressively following your goals, in the face of setbacks or “failure” is a key predictor of success. The ability to hear “no” is yet another.

From the outside, our lives resemble the standard normal curve, where 95 percent of the time we exist between 2 standard deviations of self-confidence, oscillating in the residual 5 percent between self-appraisal and self-loathing. Yet in those deepest crevices of our being, we’re not as indifferent to criticism or as confident as we appear to be. In keeping up with appearances, we morph into our best salesmen and PR agents, silently broadcasting our filtered selves.

Enter the realm of cliched phrases with the crowning glory residing with the phrase "listen to your heart". If my heart had the ability to grow wings, extricate itself from the chest cavity and allow itself to become fluent in English, that might have been a possibility. Despite our ability to rationalize every facet of our lives, why is it that we give and receive the advice "follow to your heart" with utmost conviction?

The past, neatly folded into the pages of our memory books, is often held onto ever so dearly. We re-read the dried ink of the past, memorizing its lines in the present. We defy time and will it to live on, flooding the present moment with the burdens of the past. In filling our hands with these pages coupled with the uncertainty of the pages still unwritten (the future), we fatigue our muscles long before we can exhale into the present moment. We live somewhere between the past and the future yet never quite in the now.

If you have ever watched My Big Fat Greek Wedding then you’re well aware of the grandfather who proudly proclaimed that spraying Windex on a wound is the answer to most medical maladies. Replace the grandfather with my grandmother and Windex with turmeric and it’s pretty much a given that when it comes to Indian families, you’re buying a one way ticket to Crazyville.

As we grow older, we replace “homework” with “work from home” and “self worth” with “net worth”. Our ability to stay connected has not only brought the world to our fingertips, but also our office emails and files into our bedrooms, blurring the line between work and life. This phenomenon is perhaps inevitable for we define ourselves by the work that we do.

Not all nerds are one size fits all. You see, we’re tailor made, for not all of us are four eyed and spend hours upon hours poring over books and notes, although I was guilty of both. We’re far from being Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory and we most certainly do not nonchalantly list statistics on world hunger during family meals.

If your childhood was anything like mine, chances are that one or both parents had to coax you into hitting the sack with a bedtime story or a lullaby. As we continue to grow, we perceive the concept of a “bedtime” as a punitive curfew devised for little children. Why, pray tell, would any adult subject oneself to a designated bedtime?

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